The Ebola virus was named after the Ebola River in Zaire, Africa (around the area of the first outbreaks) by Karl Johnson, then working at the Center for Disease Control.

The first sample of Ebola to be tested (the virus was then unknown) was taken during the first outbreak in 1976 from the blood of a nun (Sister M. E.) from the Ngaliema Hospital in Kinshasa, Zaire. The blood was sent to two places: the Microbiological Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, England and a national Belgium laboratory. The scientists began to try to identify the virus.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Georgia, at Center for the Disease Control, in the Special Pathogens Branch, Karl M. Johnson, the head of the branch, began to hear about the deadly "fever" in Zaire. Johnson, a doctor and virus hunter specializing in the rain forests of South and Central America, had a feeling that this was a serious virus, and tried to get a sample, also.

Johnson contacted a friend that worked at the lab in Wiltshire, who agreed to give the C.D.C. a sample, and sent it in a box with broken tubes and raw blood inside. The blood looked like black tar, according to Patricia Webb, a virologist. She tested the blood on the cells of monkeys. The virus invaded the cells quickly, and caused them to die and burst.

Frederick A. Murphy, a virologist who had helped identify the Marburg virus, then working at the C.D.C. , decided to see if he could get an electron microscope photograph of the virus inside the cells. (He was, and still is today, one of the world's leading electron microscope photographer of viruses.) On October 13, 1976, Murphy took one of the first photographs of the Ebola virus. Below is a copy of that photograph:

Murphy noticed that the virus looked similar to Marburg, a virus that is also BioSafety Level 4. The virologists began to classify the shapes. The main shape could be described as a Cheerio with a long tail. They began calling this classic shape "the shepherd's crook".

On October 14, Patricia Webb ran tests on the virus, and found that it didn't react to any of the tests of Marburg, or any other known virus. The scientists at the C.D.C. had isolated and discovered a new virus, so they were given the right to name it, so Karl M. Johnson gave it the name Ebola.

On the 15th, Johnson and his colleagues (with two other C.D.C. doctors and seventeen boxes of necessary gear) flew to Geneva, Africa, to contact the World Health Organization, in an effort to stop the outbreak of the virus currently moving through Zaire and Sudan.